Open House will run from Saturday 11th to Sunday 19th May at a London location to be revealed closer to the time. Whether you’re a council tenant facing the bedroom tax or a squatter threatened with eviction, a private renter dealing with a dodgy landlord or a member of a housing co-op fighting to survive – this space is for you.

A fascinating, hard-to-categorise book (futuristic economics? speculative advocacy? sci-phi?) that combines insights into human psychology, the nature of money and music, philosophical musings, countless anecdotes from Silicon Valley and imaginings of near-future technologies, with a clear presentation of why the world is in its current mess and how to get out of it. Expect your worldview to be, if not changed, then seriously shaken and stirred.

The starting premise of Lanier’s book is the role of information inaccuracy and asymmetry in market failures. This is not a novel idea (it lies behind the 2001 Nobel in Economics); the proposal for redressing it is. Information asymmetry and errors results in winner-take-all network structures that end up amplifying noise (errors), radiating risk outwards (to parties with less information/computational resources) and otherwise shrinking the economy. Lanier’s solution to this asymmetry is re-engineering the internet from HTML into two-way linking:

“If two-way linking had been in place, a homeowner would have known who had leveraged the mortgage, and a musician would have known who had copied his music.”

He proposes a number of ways in which this re-structuring could be attained (e.g. redundancy to protect from error and fraud) and be beneficial (e.g. faster and more efficient internet). Once universal retention of provenance is established, the second part of his proposal involves commensurate universal commercial rights over internet transactions. For this, he suggests a double-barreled pricing system:

“Each price will have two components, called ‘instant’ and ‘legacy’. The ‘instant’ part of the price will arise from agreement between buyer and seller. The ‘legacy’ component of the price will be composed of algorithmic adjustments to instant pricing that uphold the social contract and economic symmetry.”

You can think of the legacy component as royalties. A couple meet through an online matching service, end up together and remain married for x number of years. The success of their marriage helps improve the matching service’s algorithm, for which improvement (and every subsequent verification of it) they receive a nanopayment. Or I take a cool picture that ends up circulating a lot. More nanopayments. This is an area that left wide open to developments.

There are several advantages to this hybrid pricing system:

“The ‘instant’ portion of a price is vulnerable to the same old Keynesian catastrophes that have always plagued markets, but the ‘legacy’ portion is something new, only possible in an information economy, run by large computers enabled by Moore’s law. (…) The accumulated payments due to past contributions will provide a momentum to prevent stalls.”

In other words, instead of money being issued to stimulate the economy, a basic income generated by the legacy portion of nanopayments would ensure a buffer during lean times.

Risk would also be reduced and shared more equitably:

“If homeowners with mortgages had been owed something resembling royalties whenever a mortgage was leveraged, then there would not have been overleveraging. The cost of risk would have been built in from the start.”

Lanier is a strange man, waving the flag of capitalism in one hand, and describing his proposal with phrases like this in the other:

“Over time, people will hopefully adjust to the idea that you have to pay others as you would like to be paid.”

Then again, 3D-printers are just around the corner, so before long everyone will own their own means of production and capitalism as we know it will be no more…

A Consensus Handbook: co-operative decision making for activists, co-ops and communities by Seeds for Change

Over a decade’s worth of experience, distilled into 180 pages. Published April 2013.

“More and more groups are using consensus to make decisions […] Occupy groups all over the world began experimenting with different ways of reaching consensus in 2011 […] awareness of the advantages of consensus are seeping into mainstream consciousness.”

The Handbook covers the philosophy, skills, tools, challenges, beauties and pitfalls of consensus; it’s aimed at both beginners and those experienced in working with co-operative decision making.

Free to download; £4.90 direct from Seeds for Change; £6 in shops.

= Food for Thought =

Post-democracy

“social democracy will require either a partial withdrawal from the international economy, with all that this entails, or a radical transformation of how the international economy works”